Way too many inventors believe that all you need is a great idea and the world will beat a path to their door. Didn’t they ever hear the famous Thomas Edison quote, ” Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”? It is called product development for a reason. You must Develop the product.
The most successful product developers are big companies like Procter and Gamble or Black and Decker. They put together a team of experts to work on a project. Designers, engineers, prototypers, marketing, but do you know who they consider the most important element? Market Research. The Voice Of the Consumer or Customer, what they call the VOC. They use that information to develop a product that their demographic will buy.
Jennifer Dale of www.insideheads.com is a market research junky. She is addicted to finding answers to questions that most other people would never even think to ask. As a practicing researchaholic myself, I found this woman to be a fountain of knowledge with incredible focus.
She will show you how to define your demographic, conduct a number of different information gathering-techniques, use that information to create a profile or define additional issues that need to be addressed, the difference between quantitative and qualitative analysis, etc., etc.. What you will learn in one afternoon will astound you but it doesn’t stop there. Through her website she can help you do it yourself or do the research for you.
One of the most important things any professional and inventor needs to do is evolve with their field of expertise. Ms. Dale has done so with a vengeance. She worked with Amy Yoffie at Research Connections to develop two of the first web-based online platforms for conducting surveys and focus groups. Jennifer also co-authored Qual-Online, the Essential Guide and published innumerable articles regarding the subject.
If you ever watched Shark Tank you know that the make or break question always is, What are your sales? You can’t have sales without product but doing even a short run is costly. I know or know of a lot of inventors who really believed in their invention and now have a garage full of product with very little sales.
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